The animal for a specific person can be determined by the year a person was born. Each animal has different personalities and characteristics. It's believed that a person can portray characteristics similiar to the animal year in which the person was born.

Daniel Lee finds people that were born in each year of the 12 signs. He then takes a portrait of them and scans it onto his computer. From there he alters their human features by adding animal characteristics. He uses Photoshop to do all of this. He gives a little insight of this process on his website : "I have to change the eyeball from a human eyeball to an animal eyeball; I have to remove the eyebrows to make the nose broader.""

1975 - Year of the Rabbit (63, 87, 99, 11)

1967 - Year of the Sheep(79, 91, 03, 15)

1966 - Year of the Horse (78, 90, 02, 14)

1965 - Year of the Snake (77, 89, 01, 13)

1964 - Year of the Dragon (76, 88, 00, 12)

1960 - Year of the Rat (72, 84, 96, 08)

1946 - Year of the Dog (70, 82, 94, 06)

1959 - Year of the Boar (71, 83, 95, 07)

1944 - Year of the Monkey (68, 80, 92, 04)

1957 - Year of the Cock (69, 81, 93, 05)

1949 - Year of the Ox (61, 73, 85, 07)

Daniel has many other amazing pieces in his gallery, check out his NightLife series.

What a way to make a living!! Of course I came across this blurb on PopCandy, which linked to an article at Portfolio.com about Lego artist Nathan Sawaya.

"Who doesn't remember growing up playing with Legos—the small, colorful bricks that can be combined to create anything from airplanes to zebras? Most kids ultimately pack up their Legos and move on. But Nathan Sawaya never did.

The 35-year-old New Yorker makes a six-figure living as a Lego artist, creating large-scale works of art using tens of thousands of the plastic pieces. Among his recent projects are a 10-foot-tall replica of the new Trump Tower being constructed in Dubai for Donald Trump, and a four-foot-tall bumblebee commissioned by Fall Out Boy bass guitarist Pete Wentz as a gift for his new bride, pop star Ashlee Simpson. He says he receives hundreds of commission inquiries every month."

Friday, August 22, 2008

Dutch Artist Desiree Palmen, creates clothing designed to merge the wearer with the environment.

Concern about the increasing use of identity based electronic information systems and the frequent use of surveillance cameras is one of the impulses for Desiree Palmen to create her work, which uses camouflage, as it's main focus. In photo works, videos and site-specific actions, she explores the possibilities of letting people 'dissolve' into their surroundings or to let them disapaer against the background. The manipulation of clothing plays a crucial role. A shirt covers the body and then extends to cover the tabletop, confusing the contour of the body of the person wearing the shirt with the table itself. In another work, a suit is painted in such a way that when the model is in a very specific position, he/she disappears into the background. Palmen then takes pictures of these situations she creates from the ideal viewing perspective for het audience. In the actual situation, if the viewer moved one step away from this ideal view, then the function of the camouflage seizes to exist.

In recent work, she looks more specifically at the social implications of surveillance as she attemps to mislead the eye of 'Big Brother'. Beginning from the perspective of police-installed cameras in so-called dangerous streets of Rotterdam, she then creates camouflage that models wear while performing actions in the street. The models become invisible for the target audience: the surveillance personnel, while also attracting the awareness of people passing by. In her photo and video work, she uses the same surveying methods of the security systems as she reveals that being visible and invisible are both aspects of the same oppressive phenomenon.

This looks really cool!! Next time I go to OBX I want to take one of these with me! I stumbled across these pics through some random google search. (How I got from surreal art, to dolphin inspired vessels I don't know?!)

This boat, made by Innespace Productions, is intended for underwater and surface navigation, but its main strength is that it can jump out of water with the same accuracy as a dolphin. Check it out!

Thursday, August 21, 2008

My paper works have been based around an exploration of the relationship between two and three dimensionality. I find this materialization of a flat piece of paper into a 3D form almost a magic process - or maybe one could call it obvious magic, because the process is obvious and the figures still stick to their origin, without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is also an aspect of something tragic in most of the cuts. Some of the small paper cuts relate to a universe of fairy tales and romanticism, as for instance "Impenetrable Castle" inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," in which a tin soldier falls in love with a paper ballerina, living in a paper castle. Other paper cuts are small dramas in which small figures are lost within and threatened by the huge powerful nature. Others again are turning the inside out, or letting the front and the back of the paper meet - dealing with impossibility, illusions, and reflections.

I find the A4 sheet of paper interesting to work with, because it is probably the most common and consumed media and format for carrying information today, and in that sense it is something very loaded. This means that we rarely notice the actual materiality of the A4 paper. By removing all the information and starting from scratch using the blank white 80gsm A4 paper as a base for my creations, I feel that I have found a material which we all are able to relate to, and at the same time is non-loaded and neutral and therefore easier to fill with different meanings. The thin white paper also gives the paper sculptures a fragility which underlines the tragic and romantic theme of the works.